With the recent report of Calley’s death, it’s back in the news. (And I suppose you could say that the recent death of Alma Powell also put it back in the news.)
Anyway, there was a massacre by American troops of most of the civilians living in a small Vietnamese village known as My Lai on March 16, 1968. This eventually became public knowledge over a year later.
So my question is whether the My Lai massacre was unique because it occurred? Or was it unique because it eventually became public knowledge? Were there an untold number of other Vietnamese villages where similar massacres occurred but which never become publicized?
Operation Speedy Express was a counterinsurgency operation designed to interdict Viet Cong operations in the Mekong Delta. The U.S. Army’s official body count estimate of VC fighters killed was 10,889 – yet, oddly, fewer than 750 weapons were captured by American forces. The Army inspector general subsequently estimated that there may have been between 5,000 and 7,000 Vietnamese civilian casualties during the operation.
That isnt odd at all. The Cong werent that well supplied, so they would grab the extra weapons, etc. I am not saying that those totals were real or that they didnt contain civilians- just that the weapon count is not significant.
I think the OP is asking specifically about instances of intentional massacres of non-combatants by American troops, not about civilian casualties in general.
The local people, farmers trying to just trying to get by, had a hard time remaining neutral in the conflict. They either cooperated with the insurgent Viet Cong or got taken in the night and shot by their own people. You were going to cooperate.
It was not uncommon to find food and weapons stores in the villages, not for the village people but for the VC.
That was no excuse for the actions of some US forces, but they began to look at every little village as a storage for VC weapons and food stockpiles. And many were.
War is not pretty. A seemingly controlled war like Vietnam is less pretty.
Taking only these two posts into account, I don’t find this a convincing argument, more like apologetics. Especially lacking any cite that the Viet Cong were not well supplied with weapons, considering that weapons were shipped to them regularly from North Vietnam through Cambodia in the mid-late 60’s. I would say that the weapons count is not definitive (i.e. you can’t just subtract the number of weapons from the number of casualties to get the number of civilian casualties), but it is indicative.
There were always local shortages, and at the start, there were serious shortages-
During the early stages of their insurgency, the Viet Cong mainly sustained itself with captured arms (often of American manufacture)[1] or crude, self-made weapons (e.g. copies of the US Thompson submachine gun[2] and shotguns made of galvanized pipes). [3][4] Most arms were captured from poorly defended ARVN militia outposts.[5]
By 1968, things were better, but there were no excess, so why not grab those weapons- besides it screwed up body counts.
You appear to me to be changing your argument from “the weapon count is not significant” to something else. Your selective quoting, especially failing to mention the “mid-late 60’s” from my post so you could post irrelevant information about the early stages of their insurgency, is annoying.
Depends on how you mean the question. Was it the only village where large numbers of civilians were massacred up close and personal by US military personnel? Possibly, and dependent upon the definition of “large numbers”. Was it the only village where large numbers of civilians were massacred by US forces? Far from it. Villages inside free-fire zones were open season for shelling and bombing, as everyone was presumed VC. This is one of the most famous video clips from Vietnam, it’s easy to not fully digest what’s going on in it. It’s white prosperous and napalm being dropped on a village, or in the words of my Vietnam class professor, a former Marine Captain who served two tours in Vietnam, a war crime.
IV Corps, which was the Mekong Delta, was very much a VC stronghold throughout the war, and mostly a free fire zone. Attempts to justify the low weapons to body count ratio being a result of the VC being poorly supplied are just silly; all bodies were by definition assumed to be VC or VC sympathizers. The 9th Infantry Division, which carried out Speedy Express, was notorious for having the lowest weapons captured to body count ratios during the war. From the wiki article:
Ewell, was allegedly known to be obsessed with body counts and favorable kill ratios and said “the hearts and minds approach can be overdone…in the delta the only way to overcome VC control and terror is with brute force applied against the VC”.[19]David Hackworth was a battalion commander during Speedy Express; according to him, “a lot of innocent Vietnamese civilians got slaughtered because of the Ewell-Hunt drive to have the highest count in the land.” Hackworth added that “the 9th Division had the lowest weapons-captured-to-enemy-killed ratio in Vietnam.” According to Hackworth, Ewell’s policies would later earn him the nickname the “Butcher of the Delta” from members of the 9th Division.[20]Nick Turse in his book Kill Anything That Moves asserts that “free fire zones”, where any human present could be killed, helped the 9th Division achieve an unlikely enemy-to-GI kill ratio of 134:1 in April 1969.[21] It has also been asserted that the operation targeted “people running, people in black pajamas, civilians past night-time”.[4]: 356–7 Furthermore, commanders and infantry units were forced into the field, and they were told they were not to leave until an acceptable number of “kills” were made.[4]: 356–7 Robert G. Gard Jr., who served as artillery commander under Ewell and commenting on his superior officer stated “the idea that we killed only enemy combatants is about as gross an exaggeration as I could imagine, but to talk about ratios of forty-five to one simply defies my imagination.”
Even Caesar gave his enemies a chance to surrender. However, after they violated the terms of the deal and were defeated, I do not recall that he was too picky about which survivors to sell into slavery, basically they were all fair game.
The 10,889 aren’t casualties, they’re body counts. Why would you kill as a combatant someone who is not holding a weapon? Or are we supposed to believe that there were lines of unarmed combatants picking up weapons from dead bodies and then getting killed in the same confrontation?
Not a unique occurrence. I’m pretty sure massacres of unarmed civilians did happen. But how prevalent was this? Hard to tell. But My Lai was not a one-off.
I enlisted in 1980, not many years after Vietnam. I am so grateful that I did not serve in that war. I do believe that, no matter how upstanding and moral a person is, that each of us has their breaking point. And you do not want to be there after your breaking point has been breached.
Anyone who does not believe this will happen, or at least could very likely happen, is deluding themself.
Why? Fear. You’ve seen your buddies killed by seemingly innocent old ladies or children who draw you in by their seeming sadness only to be blown to bits because they held a hidden grenade. You’ve seen it, or you’ve heard of it happening.
There was a lot of unit isolation in Vietnam. Small units on patrol, checking small villages. That’s a situation conducive to not having checks and balances. A lot of situational morality.
Killing them all can (to put it extremely crudely) can keep things simpler and safer for you. In a very twisted sense.
A note that I hope is relevant. Three soldiers, Hugh Thompson, Glenn Andreotti, and Lawrence Colburn, the pilot and crew of a military helicopter, intervened to stop the massacre, using the helicopter to block fellow US Army soldiers and even threatening to fire on them. It is not surprising, but sad, that Calley’s name is remembered in the popular culture and theirs are not. And not surprising, of the 26 soldiers charged in connection with My Lai, only Calley was convicted, while his higher-ups faced no penalties.
As the Pete Seeger song, “Last Train to Nuremberg,” put it,
Do I see Lieutenant Calley?
Do I see Captain Medina?
Do I see General Koster and all his crew?
Do I see President Nixon?
Do I see both houses of Congress?
Do I see the voters, me and you?
Last train to Nuremberg!
Last train to Nuremberg!
Last train to Nuremberg!
All on board!
Who held the rifle? Who gave the orders?
Who planned the campaign to lay waste the land?
Who manufactured the bullet? Who paid the taxes?
Tell me, is that blood upon my hands?